Chip stocks fell eight days in a row, and SOXL, the 3× semiconductor ETF, lost a third of its value in a week. Normally, that is when traders head for the exit.
Perp data says the opposite. Open interest in SOXL rose 162%, and its funding rate flipped from near zero to mostly positive. TradFi perps traded $201.8B on the week, up 45% and nearly $50B more than any week we have tracked before.
This issue answers three questions: where did the money go, who was adding positions, and what happened at Sunday's overnight reopen?
Among OKX TradFi perps with at least $1M in weekly volume (excluding leveraged and inverse ETFs), fewer than 15% finished the week higher.
Top gainer: Bending Spoons (BSP, +25.5%). Berkshire Hathaway disclosed on October 14 that it is buying $330M of new shares at $33 each.
Crude oil (CL, +8.1%) and Coca-Cola (KO, +7.2%) also rose. Some defensive assets gained even as tech fell.
Top loser: Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI, −32.4%). Broadcom's CEO warned that funding limits could slow AI infrastructure spending, and optical component makers sold off. Memory names such as Kioxia (KIOXIA, −29.3%) were also near the bottom.
This was the strangest part of the week.
Two quick definitions:
Open interest (OI): the total number of perp contracts still open, a rough gauge of how much money stays in the market.
Funding rate: a fee settled every few hours between longs and shorts. When it is positive, longs pay shorts.
The numbers:
Prices fell 30–40%, yet open interest more than doubled. SOXL's funding was positive in 12 of 15 weekday settlements, up from zero the week before; KORU was positive 14 times and SanDisk 11 times.
With chips down eight days straight, the likeliest reading is that some traders bought the dip, and did it with 3× leveraged products. New positions may also include shorts and hedges, though, so these two measures alone cannot tell how many traders were long or short.
Nvidia shows the flip side: it fell the least, and its open interest dropped 28%. Money piled into the hardest-hit names and left the most resilient one.
TradFi perps traded $201.8B, up 45% on the week.
Binance took 53% and remains the dominant venue.
The fastest growth came from Bybit (+78%), Bitget (+72%) and Hyperliquid (+67%).
On-chain DEXs grew their share from 9.8% to 11.2%. The more volatile the market, the bigger the slice on-chain venues captured.
For the third week in a row, we compared perp and stock prices at the moment US overnight trading reopened, 8pm ET on Sunday.
In the previous two weekends, perps had already priced in the stocks' reopening levels, with a median gap of just 0.26%. This weekend was different:
Chip stocks jumped at the reopen. SOXL opened at 97.16.
At that moment, the SOXL perp was still at 94.62, 2.6% below the stock. Within an hour it rose to 98.10 and caught up.
The median gap across 12 stocks widened to 0.74%.
Weekend perps do not always lead. When news hits right at the reopen, the stocks can move first.
This week's chip sell-off came from doubts about the payoff from AI spending. Next week's Big Tech earnings will offer the first answers.
TokenInsight TradFi Weekly, updated every week.
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